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Maybe we're already dead?

About a week or so ago, I realised that it has been years since I last played a game by an independent developer/studio that actually made me excited.

Now there could be dozens of reasons for that, but there is one specific reason I would like to unpack a bit, because it also lets me talk about some other things that have been going through my mind lately.

I think one part of what I don’t like about how Indie Games have been changing over the last five or so years, is that so many of them now are incredibly obsessed with needing to have a good “Hook” (something that makes them stand out and be special), or tightly built “core loop” (whatever the hell that is), that makes it hard for me to really find a good personal connection to the people who made them.

It reminds me a lot about how SEO has ruined websites, or how people have to mould their Internet presence to get more visibility on social media, or increase the likelihood that some of their posts go viral.

The difference with games is that instead of having every article being littered with keywords, you get videogames that try their very best to come up with new amalgamations of game genres, that lend themselves to be centred around some awful compulsion loop mechanic and are coated in one of three different kinds of accepted aesthetics.

And as always, Steam seems to be sitting at the centre of all of this. All you have to do is scroll a bit through what Steam deems to be popular on its platform and you start to get dizzy by all the different combinations of Deck- or City Builders, Management games, Roguelikes, Turn based tactics games and (recently added) whatever the hell Vampire Survivors is supposed to be.

It starts to make sense, when you look at those nice graphs that tell you what genres seem to be popular on Steam( and completely ignore all the problems the method itself has). All of these genres have one thing in common: They all tend to lead to games that usually require people to spend a larger amount of time with them and it’s fairly simple to find ways to add some kind of live service element to them.

If you want to build a recommendation system, you have to find some way to reduce the very broad and subjective term “Good” into some kind of traceable metric and Valve decided that playing time is a good way of doing just that. To some degree it even makes sense! After all, why else would someone decide to spend dozens, if not hundreds of hours with something?

However, since we’re still operating within normal capitalist market logic, every actor is treated the same: Games from genres with generally lower playing times are measured against forever games that people spend years with. Games made with tiny budgets are compared to games that have budgets astronomically larger. And the moment you launch a game on Steam that does not fit its definition of a “good” game, you’re fighting an uphill battle.

This obviously leads to more developers adjusting their future projects (if they get this far) to better fit whatever Steam likes to promote.

A few steps further down the road, you will then get self-proclaimed “Marketing Experts” who put out poorly thought out blog posts that describe this kind of process as “reflecting the tastes of the average Steam user”, and at this point they might not even be that far off. That is, as long as we ignore how this userbase has been built, how it is maintained and if their arguments would still hold water, if Steam would change its recommendation system.

Regardless of what’s true here, one thing stays the same: We are faced with a creative wasteland, full of indistinguishable and forgettable titles, that surely are well crafted, but that lack almost any kind of recognizable personality.

Not to say that none of these games have interesting elements in them. However, like a very good critical essay that is being posted on a larger videogame website and that is full with SEO keywords and links to other “related” posts, these more interesting elements are wrapped in a thick layer of Algorithm pleasing plastic.

To be honest, I find it fascinating, how the end of the “Indie Boom” doesn’t come in the way all these useless business people have been talking about for years. There was no big crash, no wave of people going broke. In fact, just in terms of numbers, we probably have more commercially successful indie studios than ever. So in a way, the Boom (if there ever was one) has not ended, since people are still making money, right? Just look at Steam and the sheer variety it displays!

To me, the front page of Steam looks more like a Dead Zone. A place that at first glance seems to be healthy and full of life, but upon closer inspection reveals itself to be just a thin film of very similar looking games, that require the existence of the rotten Swamp underneath them. A place that is already dead, but that just isn’t aware of it quite yet.

In a sense what you see on Steam is just an extension of what you see everywhere on the Internet right now:

People have now spent so much time understanding how to game algorithms in their favour, that slipping past them is almost impossible. That in turn creates both a push for higher production values (meaning higher budgets) and with higher budgets automatically comes the need to create safer works. Not only in terms of their underlying message, but also in terms of ambition.

I’m not saying that indie games from the late 2000s to the mid 2010s were somehow more real and less commercialised, that’s definitely not true. However, looking back at these times, it does feel like the space for which kind of game could wrestle itself into the public consciousness wasn’t as narrow as it is today.

Sure, more folks are probably able to make a living with games now and that is good, I guess? I just wish this would be possible while giving these people also the ability to make games that do not fit whatever someone at Valve decided makes a “good” videogame.